Voice telecommunication has traditionally been conducted via dedicated telephone networks using telephone switching offices and either wired or wireless connections for transmitting the voice signal between users' telephones. Such telecommunications, which use the public switched telephone network (PSTN), may be referred to as circuit-switched communications. Because of the circuit-based nature of the PSTN, each call within the PSTN requires a dedicated point-to-point circuit throughout its duration, resulting in inefficient use of network bandwidth since many conversations include significant intervals of silence.
Session over Internet protocol (SoIP) provides an alternative telecommunication architecture using discrete Internet-protocol (IP) packets of digitized data to transmit media content over the Internet or within an intranet via wired and/or wireless connections. One type of SoIP technology, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), provides an alternative to the PSTN for voice communications. SoIP technology can transmit other forms of multimedia communication such as video voice content, video content and/or data. Because SoIP does not require a dedicated circuit between endpoints throughout a session (e.g., a voice call). SoIP technology makes more efficient use of network bandwidth.
A session controller (SC) facilitates the flow of two-way SoIP traffic between different parts of a network or between different networks. A SC and/or its related functionality may be part of a SoIP network. When a SC is located at the border of a network (e.g., where the SoIP network connects with another network, such as a private enterprise network), the SC is typically called a session border controller (SBC). As used herein. SC and SBC will be used interchangeably.
Conventional SC or SBC deployments consist of a single, independent SBC cluster in a network. A conventional SBC cluster may include one or more SBCs for facilitating the flow of two-way SoIP traffic between different parts of a network or between different networks. Conventional SBCs perform routing of signaling and media streams for SoIP traffic. One weakness of this approach is that a denial of service (DoS) attack at a node in the cluster or malformed packets received for routing by one SBC in the cluster may cause its routing element to fail, thus disabling the node. Furthermore, if a backup node comes online and attempts to process the same or different malformed traffic the same results are likely to occur. This may occur until the whole cluster has failed. Once a cluster has crashed in a conventional cluster deployment, all customers serviced by that cluster are unable to send or receive traffic. Hence, conventional SBC deployments have poor network resiliency.
Another shortcoming of conventional SBC deployments is difficulty of scalability. In such deployments, adding new clusters requires extensive provisioning and additional routing plans for inter-cluster traffic (i.e., traffic between clusters) increasing cost and complexity. For example, if a network operator wants to increase traffic capacity of a SoIP network with a conventional SBC deployment, the network operator may buy another SBC cluster and provision it separately from other clusters the network operator may own. Adding a new cluster requires redistributing some customers of the network operator (i.e., SoIP devices of the customers) to the new cluster. Additionally, adding a new cluster requires providing routing information including calling plans and bindings for the new cluster. Conventional SBCs traditionally have capabilities to store only a limited number of routes. Furthermore, a new cluster in a conventional deployment requires the network operator to provision additional routes for inter-cluster traffic on every cluster so that every customer of the network operator may communicate with each other. Therefore, each SBC cluster in the expanded conventional deployment may have less space for out-of-network routes. Thus, independent cluster deployments can result in inefficient management and usage of resources and may increase complexity and cost of an SBC deployment.
Accordingly, in light of these shortcomings, a need exists for methods, systems, and computer readable media for a distributed component model architecture (DCMA) system in a SoIP network that provides for increased performance, scalability, and resiliency.